First, Fiona went to
Creteil International Festival De Femmes
Watered down Waterloo coffee has left me bleary eyed as I enter Paris on the Eurostar. Cabbie looks at me with utter contempt – I am the worst breed, English with GCSE French (the words are there, but my accent it seems is like a punch in the face). Driving through Paris (lights ignored, mobile phone on the go, people eating ice-cream at 9am) and out the other side, we end up in… Luton?
Actually this is Creteil and glamourous it ain’t – but it does house one of the most prestigious and long running women’s film festivals in the world, this year boasting talent such as French superstar Charlotte Rampling, so I take a humble step forward to the Musee de Arts to see what’s on offer..
This year’s festival themes are described as ‘desire, respect and British Cinema’ and under the latter I’m seeing the usual (although highly deserving) suspects on the bill: Andrea Arnolds’ Cannes success Red Road; Mira Nair is guest of honour with a retrospective of her work and her new film The Namesake; Amma Asante’s A Way Of Life; and a focus on Sally Potters’ work.
I join various guests, Christopher Sheppard (Sally Potters’ producer), Emma Hedditch (director of Cinenova), Pratibha Parmar (director of feature Nina’s Heavenly Delights) and Sarah Turner (filmmaker), to name a few, on a panel to discuss ‘the state of the British film industry’ – the debate angles towards new technologies and how women experience the industry so differently. Interesting stuff!
At a slightly boozy filmmaker lunch I meet one of Britain’s only women Cinematographers – the dulcet toned and brilliantly named Zillah Bowes who is reeling from her brilliant success in Sundance this year (her film Enemies of Happiness [director Eva Mulvad] won the World Cinema Jury prize for best documentary).
There is definitely a wiff of a more nostalgic feminism in Creteil, where women’s creative ‘emancipation’ was making its mark and ‘post’ was not a precursor to all things cultural. There’s a sense of solidarity and most definitely a club de femme ethic to Creteil and its organisers – this festival is serious.
On Friday, I’m joined at the Bird’s Eye View (BEV) screening by Kate Jessop (a Manchester based filmmaker with the animation Desires in the BEV programme) – we confess that we feel rather in need for some distraction having just been to the retrospective of late experimental filmmaker Sandra Lahire who’s sombre, vivid and extremely moving representations of Plutonium/Uranium mines and her own personal struggle with anorexia have put us in a slightly ‘darker’ place.
The screening goes down well, Susie (female puppet masturbation!) earns a small hip hoorah and I am asked if ‘all the women at Birds Eye View are as young as me?’ (tres bon!).
And then she was off to…
Britspotting (British and Irish Film Festival), Berlin
With a healthy German cinema scene, the UK film industry should be glad for Britspotting, whose sole purpose is to promote British and Irish films to a German audience. It doesn’t just stop in Berlin, this year the programme also goes to Munich and Stuttgart, with a specific focus on trying to gain industry attention for titles without German distribution.
Having suffered the blow of the British Council pulling out as the main festival sponsor, Britspotting has this year been driven completely by the passion and commitment of its small, mainly female team who have pulled out the stops to bag titles like Kidulthood (director Menhaj Huda), Someone Else (director Col Spector), Glastonbury (director Julien Temple) and of course a great selection of shorts such as Philip Ilson’s Destricted Porn Film winners.
I’m put up in a old factory turned hostel (Die Fabrik) in what feels like the best of Berlin East (although officially West!), Kreuzberg. Kreuzberg is also the location of the main festival party on Saturday night – luckily we’re on the guest list (after much furrow browed discussion). The club is the epitome of alt. Berlin. Graffiti, disco balls, low-key furnishings, punks, unisex toilets and great beer!
On Sunday we head to a bar and discover that we are sitting opposite the organisers of British Music week in Berlin and despite major acts like The Sugarbabes pulling out – they are celebrating. Loudly. One of my German table companions (we’ve never met) leans over to me and whispers conspiratorially and with the most beautiful contempt ‘oh god, the British have arrived’ – my very best German keeps me onside as I nod disapprovingly.
